7.6.09

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

With hat tip to David Nishimura at Cronaca, scientists have used sophisticated conceptual design-assisting computer programs to help the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis recreate a lost 18th-century instrument, the lituus (a sort of natural trumpet), in an attempt to revive some of Bach's music written for it. [University of Edinburgh]

Scott Spiegelberg has some other thoughts on the lituus. Welcome back to regular blogging, Scott! [Musical Perceptions]

Wait, David Carradine studied music in his youth? Yes, his official bio says that he studied the piano as a child and, hoping to write operas (seriously), had an unsuccessful stint studying music theory and composition at San Francisco State. R.I.P. [Los Angeles Times]

Norman Lebrecht comments on audience discomfort at András Schiff's recent lecture-recital on Haydn at the Wigmore Hall, supposedly because Schiff used such arcane musico-theoretical terminology as "tonic and dominant tonal relationships" and "moving to the minor chord with the altered 5th." Lebrecht's point is that "musical terminology is often clumsy and seldom irreplaceable," meaning that jargon can exclude a general audience. I have learned this lesson as a stringer for the Washington Post as editors have flagged or excised language they find too abstruse for a general newspaper -- and thank heavens for it, since I am a poor judge of that. The problem is that precise language makes possible a more detailed analysis in the compressed space of a few column inches -- if one can refer to a memory slip in the trio of a menuet or the repeated hammering of the chromatically altered tonic at the end of the second movement of Beethoven's op. 106. To give a parallel, would someone analyzing literature not expect his audience to know what he meant by the terms dénouement or Bildungsroman? [Slipped Disc]

András Schiff will give a similar presentation on Haydn in New York next February. [92nd St. Y]